It has long been the practice of bands and other institutions that handle large numbers of coins to arrange like coins in stacks or rolls of fifty and secure the rolls with an exterior wrapper of paper or plastic for ease of sorting, counting and transport. Such institutions also commonly find it necessary to remove large numbers of coins from their exterior wrappers for subsequent processing of the coins as, for example, in automated machinery. In the past, such removal has largely been accomplished by hand through the use of various implements and tools such as that disclosed in U.,S. Pat. No. 4,038,746 of Bromley. Sometimes, no tools are used at all and the rolls are simply smashed against a stationary object to break open the exterior wrappers whereupon the coins can be emptied into a collector.
While these manual methods of removing coins from their wrappers have been somewhat successful, they nevertheless have proven to be plagued with numerous inherent problems and shortcomings. Labor costs for such manual operations, for example, can be exceedingly high, particularly where large volumes of coins must be unwrapped on a continuing basis. Further, institutions often find it difficult to retain employees for unwrapping coin dolls because of the inherent boring and unchallenged nature of the job. Finally, as with most manual operations, unwrapping the coins by hand is slow and tedious and often becomes the bottle neck in a series of mostly automated coin handling processes.
A continuing and heretofore unaddressed need therefore exists for a method and enabling apparatus adapted to remove the wrappers from coin rolls quickly, reliably, automatically and with a minimum of required human intervention. It is to the provision of such a method and apparatus that the present invention is primarily directed.